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2025-07-15 -Short Attention Span Theater-
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Gavin Newsom Taunts Texas on Redistricting, but Can't Deliver on Threat
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[Breitbart] California Gov. Gavin Newsom taunted Texas over redrawing its congressional districts, suggesting he would retaliate — though California, with an independent redistricting commission, has no legal way of doing so.
Last week, Newsom posted a clip of an interview on X in which he said that California “is watching — and you can bet we won’t stand idly by” as Texas redrew congressional districts in a special session of the legislature.
Newsom failed to note that redistricting is only one of 18 items on the agenda for the special session; that the state was responding to a U.S. Department of Justice demand that it redraw the districts, because they were allegedly drawn in an unconstitutional manner; and that the Texas legislature does not meet year-round.
“These guys — they’re not fucking around,” Newsom said, claiming that he was trying to “raise the bar of bipartisanship in California,” while noting that his state had an independent redistricting commission.
In his post on X, Newsom hinted that California might find a way to respond to the redistricting in Texas.
However, as the San Francisco Chronicle explained, Newsom does not have the power to retaliate:
California’s laws constrain Newsom from responding in kind to any efforts in Texas to redraw maps to favor Republicans. Voters in California took that power from the state Legislature in 2008 and handed it to an independent redistricting commission, which draws the lines for California’s congressional and state legislative districts. Though Newsom is correct that Democrats dominate the Legislature, they do not dominate the redistricting commission. By law, the commission comprises five Democrats, five Republicans and four commissioners not affiliated with either party.
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Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College who serves as one of the Democratic commissioners, said the governor doesn’t have any power over the commission’s activities and can’t force it to draw new maps in Democrats’ favor.
“In this national context, I can understand the governor’s inclination to want to retaliate,” she said. “However the people of California have made it clear at the ballot that the governor does not have that power.”
It is possible that Newsom may have been thinking of the way in which Democrats have gamed the nominally “independent” commission to make California districts more favorable to Democrats. The left-leaning news outlet ProPublica documented how Democrats “fooled” the commission by organizing local groups to testify about district boundaries who did not actually represent communities, but were working for the party.
Newsom may have given the game away, telling the truth about the “independent” commission.
Still, he lacks the power, legally to do anything about what Texas does to redraw its districts.
As for “raising the bar of bipartisanship,” Democrats recently stripped key Republicans of their committee posts in the state legislature.
California also opposes excluding illegal migrants from the Census, because then it would lose more congressional seats than it already has in recent years due to slow growth relative to states like Texas. 
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Posted by Skidmark 2025-07-15 09:51||
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